Irrationality Quotes - Page 3

• Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.

  George Ritzer

  Mean, People, Humanity

  George Ritzer (1994). “Sociological Beginnings: On the Origins of Key Ideas in Sociology”, McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages

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• ...following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality was like following a burning fuse in search of an explosive.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Government, Burning, Following

  William F. Buckley, Jr. (1959). “Up from Liberalism”

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• God is great"). Conversations about the practical impossibility of God's existence and the science-based irrationality of an afterlife slid seamlessly into xenophobia over Muslim immigration or the practice of veiling. The New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason. "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.

  Sam Harris

  Atheist, Xenophobia, Practice

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• The idea of Jewish settlements under Palestinian sovereignty, as was suggested by someone in the Prime Minister's office, is very dangerous and reflects an irrationality of values.

  Naftali Bennett

  Ideas, Office, Prime

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• We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.

  Dean Koontz

  People, Evil, Laughing

  Dean Koontz (2007). “Life Expectancy”, p.139, Bantam

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• Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.

  Iain Pears

  Philosophy, Teaching, Men

  Iain Pears (2003). “Dream of Scipio”, p.237, Penguin

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• In order to teach a course in the history of Western religious thought, I had to do a great deal of research in the writings within the Judaic and Christian traditions and I was astonished to find in those writings philosophical thought of great power and sophistication. These writings completely blew away all my opinions about what I had taken to be the irrationality or immaturity of religious ideas, opinions which were and still are fashionable in many intellectual and literary circles today.

  Jacob Needleman

  Christian, Religious, Philosophical

  Source: www.watkinsmagazine.com

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• Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

  Livy

  War, Upset, Calculations

  "History of Rome". Book by Livy. Book XXX, section 30,

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• The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.

  Paul Bloom

  Gay, People, Abortion

  "To urgh is human" by Paul Bloom, www.theguardian.com. July 21, 2004.

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• A letter is paradoxically the most revealing and the most deceptive of confessional revelations. We all have our inconsistencies, prejudices, irrationalities which, although strongly felt at the time, may be transitory. A letter captures the mood of the moment. The transitory becomes immutably fixed, part of the evidence for the prosecution or the defence.

  P. D. James

  Prejudice, Letters, May

  P. D. James (2007). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.85, Vintage

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• Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.

  Larry Wall

  Thinking, Language, Designer

  "Present Continuous - Future Perfect", February 26, 2006.

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• Theology is in disrepute among most Western intellectuals. The word is taken to mean a passe form of religious thinking that embraces irrationality and dogmatism. So too, Scholasticism.

  Rodney Stark

  Religious, Taken, Mean

  Rodney Stark (2014). “How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity”, p.103, Open Road Media

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• We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

  Albert Camus

  Real, Past, Life And Death

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.97, Vintage

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• Interestingly, human irrationality is a hot topic in economics at the moment. Behavioural economics it's called, on the cusp of economics and psychology.

  Evan Davis

  Psychology, Hot, Topics

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• Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.

  Eric Gill

  Writing, Character, Men

  Eric Gill, Christopher Skelton (1993). “An Essay on Typography”, p.121, David R. Godine Publisher

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• The Bobbit case, which brought to life the ancient mythic archetype of woman as castrator, demonstrated that women are as aggressive as men and that sex is a dark, dangerous force of nature. But of course the feminist establishment, stuck in its battered-woman blinders, learned nothing as usual from this lurid refutation of its normal views. Classic art works like Bizet's Carmen tell us more about the irrationality of love, jealousy and revenge than do all the pat formulas of the counseling industry.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Sex, Revenge

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• The transfinite numbers are in a certain sense themselves new irrationalities and in fact in my opinion the best method of defining the finite irrational numbers is wholly disimilar to, and I might even say in priciple the same as, my method described above of introducing trasfinite numbers. One can say unconditionally: the transfinite numbers stand or fall with the finite irrational numbers; they are like each other in their innermost being; for the former like the latter are definite delimited forms or modifications of the actual infinite.

  Georg Cantor

  Fall, Numbers, Finite Number

  "Understanding the Infinite". Book by Shaughan Lavine, 1994.

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• [Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.

  Roger Scruton

  Liberty, Fraternity, Form

  Roger Scruton (2009). “The Roger Scruton Reader”, p.10, A&C Black

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• What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.

  Timothy Gowers

  Independent, Principles, Doe

  Timothy Gowers (2010). “Mathematics”, p.50, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.

  Arnold Aronson

  Running, Spring, War

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• The northern ocean is beautiful, ... and beautiful the delicate intricacy of the snowflake before it melts and perishes, but such beauties are as nothing to him who delights in numbers, spurning alike the wild irrationality of life and baffling complexity of nature's laws.

  John Lighton Synge

  Life, Beautiful, Ocean

  John Lighton Synge (1957). “Kandelman's Krim: A Realistic Fantasy”

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• Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

  Terence McKenna

  Reality, Sea, Moments

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• I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.

  Irvin Kershner

  Dream, Acceptance, Artist

  "Irvin Kershner obituary" by Ronald Bergan, www.theguardian.com. November 29, 2010.

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• The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profit

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Fun, Loser, Flaws

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.15, Random House

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• But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.

  Paul A. Baran

  Order, Study, Reason

  Paul A. Baran (1968). “Political Econ of Growth”, p.4, NYU Press

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